By Glenn Kessler:
So while the Obama administration expanded the list of countries, it sought to keep the focus on travel, not nationality. Trump, by contrast, has taken the opposite approach — keeping the focus on a person’s nationality.
Charles Kurzman, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who tracks Muslim American violent extremism, says that since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, only 23 percent of Muslim Americans involved in extremist plots had family backgrounds in the seven countries identified by Trump — and that “there have been no fatalities in the United States caused by extremists with family backgrounds in those countries.”
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The issue is much more complex than suggested by the Trump White House. The original intent of the law was to insist on greater scrutiny of people who had traveled to Syria and Iraq, even if they were citizens of countries that qualified for a visa waiver. In other words, lawmakers were seeking to identify possible radicalization, not single out citizens.
Four countries were identified by Congress, in a bill signed by Obama, and then the Obama administration added three more. But Obama — and Democrats in Congress — wanted to require greater visa scrutiny of people who had traveled to those countries. When given a chance, the Obama administration specifically rejected the citizenship-based restrictions that Trump has now ordered. So while the names are the same, the approach is the polar opposite.
The Full Story (February 7, 2017)
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